Buffalo update: You know the old saying “No one is really from Buffalo. Wait a minute. . . . Yes, some people are. Man, that is so sad”? Local tourism department really struggled fitting that on a T-shirt. Yes, Buffalo is a sad place, a large part of that being how cold the place is, and it’s getting colder. In fact, this past Thanksgiving was the coldest Thanksgiving in the city ever. How could this be? Perhaps because science has much more sophisticated tools to gauge temperature and human misery—what the science folks refer to as the Wind-Chill-Why-We-Here? Factor. There’s another reason, one that explains not only why Buffalo is getting colder, but also why California fires and 500-year storms now come a couple of times per year: climate change. The federal government agrees and said so in a recently released report that said climate change could cost the U.S. a whopping 10 percent of its GDP—and, oh, yeah, a bunch of people will die. The report was supposed to be released in December, but instead, it was released the day after Thanksgiving by the Trump administration because it figured no one was paying attention and it doesn’t care if people die. That’s not a joke. Rake your weeds.
Miami update: Miami is in Florida, and Florida is fucked-up. You know, “A Florida man . . .” But the thing about Miami is that it is fucked-up in a decidedly different way than the rest of the state. It’s a major city, with a large, diverse population as opposed to the rest of the state, which is predominately white and predominately believes an industrious and entertaining Saturday night has been achieved with equal parts booze and/or meth and sticking one’s junk someplace it was never intended to be stuck, say, a carburetor or the hot oil fryer at McDonald’s. That is not to say Miami is any better or safer. It’s just that in Miami, you’re more likely to get killed by the cops, whereas in the rest of the state you’re just as likely to be killed by an alligator. Or a cop. Who will then feed you to an alligator.
Who to root for: Buffalo. Trying to rank the coldest days in Buffalo is like trying to rank the stupidest things Donald Trump has ever uttered, though one of them certainly would have been about the cold. He recently tweeted, “Brutal and extended cold blast could shatter ALL RECORDS. Whatever happened to Global Warming?” How do you explain to a moron there’s a difference between “weather” and “climate” when he admits he fails to recognize the distinction between “yes,” “no” and “Don’t grab me there, perv!”
